


I Am A Man Upon The Land

by ComplicatedLight



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: AU, M/M, Selkies, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 01:32:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4858109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ComplicatedLight/pseuds/ComplicatedLight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Val had been the evening sun, turning the waves to fire. And now there's James . . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Am A Man Upon The Land

You’ve walked as a human man on the land for more than forty years—loving humans, mourning humans, clearing up the messes humans make. But at night you still dream of the sea. On the nights when you don’t dream of murder and fire and cars ploughing into shoppers, you dream of the sea. You dream of lazily spiralling down great fronds of kelp; of drifting vertically down through the water, head first, and exhaling, just to feel the air bubbles tickling your flanks and belly as they drift up past you. You dream of being just a yearling, weaned and alone for the first time in the infinite sea. Of rocketing through murky slabs of ocean after herring and cod, fattening yourself up against the cold. Of sunbathing on storm beaches. Of calling to a mate, who even now you can picture, beautifully fat and sleek and eager for pups. Of being selkie.

Even now, you can catch sight of a squall of seagulls following a tractor across a field, as you drive through the Oxfordshire countryside, or you can spot some trout—gold lightening flashing through the Cherwell—while you’re sitting in a pub garden with James. Immediately your blood is up, thundering through your heart like a wave through a tight gap in the rocks. Even now, after forty-odd years, the pull to be your selkie self is so strong that you have to hold fast to the wooden bench you and James are perched on, you have to lean your shoulder against him, to keep yourself here. To keep yourself from diving into the insipid, unsalted water of the Cherwell to feast on those tiny bites of gold. Just imagine the uproar if you actually did it! Imagine the look on James’ face, watching you clambering back out of the river, clothes sodden and muddy, fish blood and scales dripping down your chin. 

You don’t have an urge to run away, exactly. You _want_ to be here. The urge isn’t about where you are or who you’re with—it’s about _what_ you are. Even now, after decades of living a steady, human life—all work suits and ready meals—it still catches you. Your dark, animal, selkie self, who could be free and wild in the sea. Your body aches for the cold, briny depths because your urge is to run towards yourself. And that ache was much worse in the early years of living in this dry, alien world.

You were always curious about the people on the land, even as a pup. Once you were weaned and could swim off on your own, you’d wander into harbours and watch the fishermen tending their boats and nets. You’d gaze up at the buildings on the quayside—strange human-constructed cliffs to your young selkie eyes. You’d watch the people dozing and playing on beaches, the kiddies shrieking as they ran in and out of the surf on their odd, skinny legs. You’d worry when the same kids had a go at swimming; to your seal mind, they were so obviously ill-suited to life in the rough, chilly sea. You’d watch them till they were all safely back on the sand, shivering and tired and calling for their mams. Not so different to your own kind, really.

You knew—all the selkies in your part of the North Sea knew—that if you wanted to go onto the land, you should do it at Cullercoats, a small fishing village with a sheltered harbour. A selkie couple lived a human life there, in a wooden cottage right on the shore. They’d take you in, and give you some clothes, and look after your sealskin. They’d feed you and teach you how to move in human society, if that’s what you wanted. And you _did_ want that. There was so much you wanted to understand about humans, about life on the land. So many questions, so much information to be gathered, so many theories in your mind that needed testing. No wonder you became a detective. The woman who took you in would smile at all your questions; call you inquisitive. The other young selkie who was living with them at the time, who you came to think of as a brother: he called you nosy.

So, you asked your questions and you observed the people around you, and you learned how to be a man upon the land; a good man. You passed exams and found a job that suited you. You made friends, and fell in love, and built a happy, family life. And you _were_ very happy, even though your seal heart, your seal self, never stopped yearning for that other life; that life of the body, of instinct, of being utterly in your element. There might be days or even weeks when you were so caught up in your land life that you would hardly notice the pull. But it was always there—a silent, visceral tug towards the sea, as if some wordless part of you was always straining to hear the wash of waves on a beach.

You and Val moved to Oxford for a good job, for a nicer place to bring up kids, because Val had family there: all good and valid reasons. All true, but not the whole truth. The _real_ truth. You and Val moved to be inland. To be far enough from the sea that you would no longer stride round the corner of some old warehouse on the Tyne and without warning catch a lungful of salt-blessed air blown up the river ahead of a storm. You chose to move to Oxford so you wouldn’t have to lean against the stonework of a Newcastle warehouse to stop yourself from running the three miles back to your little terraced house and up the stairs to the back bedroom. To stop yourself yanking open the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe there, pulling out your sealskin, and then running, running with it clutched to your chest, to the first bit of water that would lead you to the sea again. You chose.

You loved Val with all your heart. There was never any question of you leaving her—you knew that the night you met her. She was pretty and cheeky. She was kind. She was as reliable as the tide. She was a safe cove in a storm. She was the evening sun, turning the waves to fire. She was all of this and more to you. You dived into her and found a home on the land. Val had your heart, which you freely gave her. But your soul was never your own to give. Your soul belonged to the sea. Your soul _belongs_ to the sea. This is what it is to be selkie. A selkie who comes onto the land and falls in love with a human is blessed, and cursed.

After Val died, the urge to return to the sea and to just dive down to where sunlight never reaches, nearly destroyed you. You wouldn’t leave the kids though; wouldn’t leave them fatherless as well as motherless, but _Christ_ , no one will ever know what it cost you to stay human. You hired a storage unit out in Headington and locked your sealskin away—secure but deliberately out of sight and difficult to access. Then you got yourself a secondment to the British Virgin Isles—surrounded by sea of course—a pretty enough, tepid bath of a sea, but not _your_ sea. Not the wild, wind-driven breakers of the North Sea and the Atlantic. You kept yourself as far from your sea as you could, for two years . . . until you knew you could bear to be near it again without losing your mind. 

And now there’s James. 

The two of you had a drunken fumble once. Over a year ago, now. It didn’t go much further than a bit of kissing and some roving hands, both of you lonely and frustrated and full of adrenaline after a case. James had launched himself at you, while you watched an old film on the telly, and God knows you’d responded eagerly enough. The kissing had been rough and clumsy and his late night stubble had scratched your face to hell, but you’d be lying to yourself if you tried to claim you hadn’t liked it; really liked it. Nothing like kissing Val, or any woman, come to that, but it’d turned out that that wasn’t a problem. Not at all. His hands on your shoulders and back had felt strong and safe, and suddenly you’d wanted to know how they’d feel on your prick.

But then your bloody phone had rung and James had groaned and rolled off the sofa and away from you, reaching for your suit jacket. The case you’d thought was over had turned out to have one more bloody twist to it. The bastard you’d charged with murder earlier in the day had just been found in a coma on his cell floor and had been rushed to the John Radcliffe. There was talk of possible poisoning and someone having got to him and suddenly it was a god-awful mess all over again. 

At the sound of the phone ringing, the two of you had automatically snapped back into being DI and sergeant: business-like and competent; instantly generating a list of hypotheses and tasks. Pavlov’s cops. The barely started whatever it was between you had been shoved aside in the need to get back to work. By the time you’d pulled into the hospital car park, it was almost as if the kiss had never happened. Though all night you just hadn’t been able to get warm, even in the stuffy, overheated hospital. Somehow, you'd felt colder than the North Sea in winter. Well, except for your jaw and mouth, which had been hot and stinging from the kissing. Your fingers had kept finding their way there, and you’d had to shove your hands in your pockets in the end. James had been his usual, efficient self, that night. A little quiet, maybe, but nothing new there. 

When the case had finally been laid to rest, two days later, you’d been so tired you’d barely been able to see, let alone think straight. So you’d sent James off to his own flat, with instructions to keep away from work and to sleep for the whole weekend; something you regret now. By the time Monday morning had come round, the kiss had felt more like a dream than reality. You hadn’t said anything—hadn’t known how to talk about it, though you’d known what you wanted. And James had never said anything; had probably felt as awkward as hell about the whole thing, knowing him. So you’d just got on with it. You’d picked up the next case and then the next one, and that night had drifted further and further away, though you still think about it every day.

At one point, just before that bloody phone had rung, you’d flipped the two of you over so that you’d been sprawled on top of him, and you’d pulled the collar of his shirt open, to kiss his neck. He was warm and starting to sweat and you’d followed a bead of it down into the pale hollow above his collarbone and had lapped at it. And just for a moment, with your face pressed against his damp skin and your mouth watering at the brine you had just kissed from him—just for that moment, you were home.

So, no; you won’t leave James alone in Oxford. Even though nothing like that night has happened between you since. Even though it took the two of you months to get back to your old selves around each other. The truth of it is that James is as close to a home as you’re ever going to get again, without donning a grey pelt and launching yourself into the cold North Sea. 

And just occasionally, you catch James watching you. Your eyes meet, momentarily, and then he looks away, but there’s something there; some heat, some need. Something. Maybe you’re imagining it because you want it so much, but you don’t think so. 

His eyes are the colour of sea kissed by sunlight. You can wait.

**Author's Note:**

> A little while back I got obsessed with the folk song The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry - I've sung it so much that it appears as background music in a lot of my dreams! This fic was inspired by one of the verses of the song:
> 
> I am a man upon the land,  
> I am a silkie in the sea,  
> And when I'm far, and far from here,  
> My home it is in Sule Skerry.
> 
> I warn you, the rest of the song is pretty dark!


End file.
